Pros
The technicians I worked with at Matrix were some of the best coworkers I've ever had, and I remain friends with almost all of them even after leaving the company. The technicians are talented, knowledgeable, and great team players. The experience I gained in just a few months at Matrix propelled my career forward greatly, but this would have been the case at any Managed Service Provider, and has nothing to do with Matrix specifically.
Kontras
1) Turnover, turnover, turnover. During my interview with the owner and president of the company, I asked directly if there was a turnover issue at Matrix, and was told that no, there is not a turnover problem. As it turns out, I was lied to, and I accepted the position under false pretenses. In the last 9 months alone, the company has eclipsed 100% turnover. Almost all of the institutional knowledge held by the technicians necessary to successfully service clients has been lost. 2) Micromanagement. Employees are required to track their hours spent on individual tickets, with a requirement to log 33.5 hours of work every week. Keep in mind, this isn't clocking in and out at the beginning and end of the day. Employees are asked to track (down to the minute) the exact amount of time spent on every single thing they do throughout the day. In addition to being a time sink in and of itself, the primary issue with this system is that if one isn't able to log 33.5 hours for a given week for whatever reason, their timesheet is returned to that employee for editing under the vague and unspoken threat of possibly not being paid for that week if they don't come up with enough hours. Salaried employees should not have to worry about having to track their time and potentially not being paid their full salary if their time doesn't meet arbitrary requirements set by management. Not only is this illegal, it is extremely demoralizing. Given the disorganized and undocumented nature of the technical environment that Matrix operates, interruptions to work are common and time-consuming, throwing a wrench into a technician's ability to effectively track their time. Obviously, this encourages employees to pad the time entered in each ticket to ensure they reach 33.5 hours for the week so they don't have to deal with 1) having to worry about not being paid and 2) not having to deal with the office manager inevitably coming down on anyone that didn't log enough hours the following week. 3) Noncompetitive compensation. Matrix pays an average of 10-20k under what could be considered a competitive salary for the technical roles at the company. In addition, the benefits package is limited to lackluster medical coverage that you have to wait 90 days to take advantage of. Matrix does not offer 401k matching or any other benefits that make their compensation package remotely competitive. 4) Treatment of employees. The company treats employees unprofessionally and it is painfully obvious that they do not prioritize employee satisfaction. New technicians are favored and treated well in hopes that they will stick around for longer than the average (which is about 3-6 months), while technicians that have been there longer are treated harshly and held to double-standards by the office manager and ownership. 5) 'Optional' unpaid training lunches (that you will be harassed about not attending until you give in and attend). There seems to be a strange catch-22 wherein management realizes that they have an immense turnover problem that can only be resolved by increasing employee retention, while at the same time exacerbating the exact issues that are driving employees away from the company. An example of this behavior is the situation surrounding the on-call requirement. During my interview, I was led to believe that time spent on-call would be compensated. After I started, I learned that this was not the case, and that time-spent on-call was not compensated at all. As salaried, non-exempt employees, all L1 and L2 technicians are entitled to overtime pay. After ownership was notified of this, it took five weeks for an on-call compensation policy to be implemented, and was only implemented after an employee demanded it before they would accept any on-call shifts. Of course, no backpay was offered or even considered for employees that had been working on-call shifts for months. The on-call compensation, by the way, includes $100 per week-long on-call shift worked (requiring you to be available for roughly 5 additional hours outside of your normal work hours on weekdays, and for a full workday on Saturday and Sunday), plus time-and-a-half pay for any work done after-hours, which IT professionals with experience working in an MSP will know is woefully insufficient. It is unconscionable that they compensate their employees as little as they do while treating them as badly as they do and are still be surprised when 80% of their employees are actively looking to jump ship ASAP.